Is 2020 the year for overcoming Virtual Reality ‘cybersickness’?

Since its earliest inceptions, VR has been scrutinised by researchers and businesses alike for its potential gains, and its potential pitfalls.

One of the difficulties that VR has faced is the association with motion sickness or ‘cybersickness’.

As the global pandemic pushes us towards greater dependence on technology for our work & life needs, it seems like there’s never been a better time than the present for putting this ‘VR sickness’ thing behind us once and for all.

Let’s take a look at how things stand.

What is ‘cybersickness’ anyway?

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, ‘Cybersickness’ or ‘VR sickness’ refers to a form of nausea or discomfort associated with the use of virtual reality technology. As TheGamer’s Chloe Prince puts it: ‘it’s basically motion sickness but VR edition’.

Thankfully, it doesn’t affect everyone (and everyone is affected differently); but there are a few theories about why and how it happens.

The Inner Ear

One of the main explanations for cybersickness is that VR can produce situations where the eye and the ear disagree with each other.

When you’re playing a VR game like Echo Arena, the eyes report that the body is flying, flipping, cruising around. Meanwhile, the inner ear (or ‘vestibular system’) reports that you’re standing stationary in your living room (or something like that).

It’s this sensory conflict that makes you feel strange. It’s a bit like reading when you’re in the passenger seat of a moving car but in reverse.

Framerate

Another popular theory suggests that drops in framerate in VR can be responsible for cybersickness/disorientation.

The brain is used to processing the world at a high framerate. When virtual reality experiences that mimic our vision of reality fall below that threshold, we experience an uncomfortable ‘glitching’ effect.

The Good News!

Ok. So. This might all seem pretty doom and gloom. But the good news is: cybersickness doesn’t have to be an insurmountable barrier.

If personal experience as a VR user and demoer has taught me anything it’s that the primary reaction to virtual reality is one of wonder and excitement, not discomfort. People have more often told me “that was incredible” than “that made me feel sick”.

Moreover, for those of us who are affected, researchers like Shawn Green (UW-Madison) have shown that we tend not to feel bad for very long. Like getting your ‘sea legs’ on a boat, the body eventually adapts to VR.

“On a boat, maybe you stare at the horizon for a while and get those cues synced up,” Green says. “It’s probably contextual. Your body learns that in this situation, cues often mismatch. So, you just learn to ignore the mismatch.”

But that’s not all. Even better — there’s a whole bunch of businesses, developers, and researchers who are making it their mission to discover the causes of cybersickness, and reduce its effects across the industry.

Here are just a few great anti-cybersickness innovations from 2020:

GingerVR Toolkit

This year marks the release of The Ginger VR tool kit, an anti-cybersickness software package funded by the National Science Foundation.

Named after the ginger plant (known as an antidote for nausea) Ginger VR was created to make it as easy as possible for Unity VR developers to reduce the effects of cybersickness in their games. It offers eight programmatic techniques for cybersickness reduction, all of which are included in a open-source repository.

Presented at the 2020 IEEE Conference, Ginger VR is said to be “the first open-source Unity software tool kit that allows developers to use proven techniques and innovative solutions against cybersickness in future extended reality environments.”

You can find more info here.

Narrative & Cybersickness Research, Waterloo

In February 2020, researchers from the University of Waterloo made some fascinating discoveries about the relationship between narrative immersion and cybersickness that may go a long way towards helping us understand how it works.

They ran a series of tests in which participants were asked to play a VR game. Half of the players were given an emotionally evocative story intro to the game; half weren’t.

The findings were that, for VR newbies, the story intro had a noticeable effect on their cybersickness — seemingly reducing their feelings of nausea by increasing their feelings of ‘presence’ and immersion.

“We found that people who had little to no experience playing video games had reduced cybersickness if they received this enhanced narrative […]. What that tells us is that the actual design of the VR simulation’s storyline itself can reduce the negative impact some people experience with VR technology.”

Séamas Weech, a postdoctoral fellow in Kinesiology and a member of Waterloo’s Games Institute

Thinking about my own experiences of VR, it’s perhaps no surprise that increasing a player’s immersion through storytelling is a big help. When we’re drawn into a VR story (when we feel a sense of ‘presence’), we pay less attention to the real world around us. On some level, could this account for a lessening of the effects of sensory mismatch that drives cybersickness?

“People with little gaming experience are highly sensitive to conflicts between VR technology and the information they are taking in,” said Michael Barnett-Cowan, a Kinesiology professor and member of the Games Institute. “Enriched narratives seem to enhance presence and reduce cybersickness due to the decreased focus on problems with the multiple inputs to their senses.”

The Future

With all this in mind, then, has 2020 marked a turning point in the fight against cybersickness?

Well, not quite yet. But with innovations like these, we’re hopeful that the industry’s approach to virtual reality accessibility and comfort will continue to grow and expand.

Here’s to a cybersickness-less future!

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